in viriconium

by uzwi

At {feuilleton} John Coulthart considers forty years of attempts to cover & market Viriconium, most of which failed because the publishers couldn’t or wouldn’t face the actual content of the books. To celebrate, here’s a shot of the barrel proof stock–

The houses up here, warm and cheerful as they are in summer, become in the first week of September cold and damp. Ordinary vigorous houseflies, which have crawled all August over the unripe lupine pods beneath the window, pour in and cluster on any warm surface, but especially on the floor near the electric fire, and the dusty grid at the back of the fridge; they cling to the side of the kettle as it cools. That year you couldn’t leave food out for a moment. When I sat down to read in the morning, flies ran over my outstretched legs.

“I suppose you’ve got the same problem,” I said to Mr Ambrayses. “I poison them,” I said, “but they don’t seem to take much notice.” I held up the Vapona, with its picture of a huge fly. “Might as well try again.”

“In the first we are asked to imagine certain sites in the world–a crack in the concrete in Chicago or New Delhi, a twist in the air in an empty suburb of Prague, a clotted milk bottle on a Bradford tip–from which all flies issue in a constant stream, a smoke exhaled from some fundamental level of things. This is what people are asking–though they do not usually know it–when they say exasperatedly, “Where are all these flies coming from ?” Such locations are like the holes in the side of a new house where insulation has been pumped in: something left over from the constructional phase of the world.

“This is an adequate, even an appealing model of the process. But it is not modern; and I prefer the alternative, in which it is assumed that as Viriconium grinds past us, dragging its enormous bulk against the bulk of the world, the energy generated is expressed in the form of these insects, which are like the sparks shooting from between two flywheels that have momentarily brushed each other.” —A Young Man’s Journey.

16 Comments to “in viriconium”

I have the graphic novel and good as it is, for me the illustrations are too confining as are most of the front covers. A single picture may indeed tell a thousand words, but all too often those words will merely repeat an identical, often superficial snapshot of the actual work. And as John Coulthart points out, Viriconium defies simplistic categorisation. For me, Viriconium stands alone, as it pulls together so many literary traditions while creating one of its own. It might deal in the fantastic, but fantasy it’s not. However and sadly, the moment the word ‘fantasy’ is mentioned people’s mindsets immediately switch to hobbit-land or Conan.

There are a thousand illustrations of the Pastel City and its stories in my mind, put there by your prose. But if I was looking for an artist for a front cover, it would have to be Turner.

Hi nigel foster, thanks for the insight. I’ve always wanted something abstract & typographical, something that came with one bare stylised image & a lot of input from the designer. Something like the handprint on the Alexandria Quartet or Gunter Grasse’s dwarf for The Tin Drum; something stark. But if wishes were horses…

What a crazy array of designs! Out of all of them, the Bibliopolis and Laser-Books come closest to getting at the feeling I had while reading it, and are shockingly beautiful to boot. The Nocturnos de Viriconium cover especially. Kinda want that for a desktop image now.

I also like the idea of soemthing faintly emblematic but perhaps with the energy to run free of its own lines – the hare on the spine of ‘Out with Romany’ for example. I take Nigel’s point about things getting full of tabards at a moment’s notice but as long as it’s folksy as in the typography of union banners and pub signs, why not? There’s enough of our own experience of trying to pattern the material chaos foisted on us to banish the twee. There’s one artist/illustrator who might do this but who may for some be a bit too on the Froud side: Rima Staines – I could see her doing the rubber heads of fish and horse with the right amount of Grimmness via Wookey Hole

The Pennington is etched on my mind as I had a large poster of it on my wall for years, even thought it never evoked the book for me. I like the Goodwin on the Gollancz omnibus, but again as artwork it doesn’t match the contents. Too heavy. Too industrial. I’ve always thought of Viriconium as semi-transparent in the way a very old person’s flesh becomes thin and papery, revealing the mortal structure beneath. You need someone of the calibre of Peake to do it justice.

Interesting. I agree with MikeM’s point about folklore: there’s a lot of it in the text–the Mari Lwyd being only the most obvious reference–& thus a lot of imagery that could be used emblematically. My favourites so far are, obviously, the Millers. Of those I marginally prefer the Unwin cover, simply because I think he has caught the energy of the Barley Brothers so well, while eschewing any kind of generic fantasy image; and because I really like the mixed media. Despite the detail, that one is on the verge of emblematic (like much of Ian’s work). Viriconium ought to have–among its other qualities–that sort of hideous, expressionistic fairground energy.

@iotar: When I first read Viriconium, I got a sense of disassociation from anything traditional in fantasy or science fiction, or frankly, any genre. That drawing was an initial attempt to wrap my mind around the concepts in the saga, and in doing so, I found that I not only needed to deconstruct my perceptions of the fantastic in literature, but in art as well.
I’m not too happy with the image, and could have left it hidden, but I felt that the attempt was worth posting, as I don’t see any Viriconium fan art (probably for the reasons I mentioned), and I wanted it to serve as a reminder to myself that I needed to think harder about what visually representing Viriconium means.
To date, I have not attempted another illustration. When I do though, it will be in the midst of re-reading the saga, so I can fully react to the prose in the way it deserves.
Cheers.
Vladimir (Mystery Monotreme on Flickr)